This blog discusses all the work i have carried out on various subjects of my interest..

Monday, June 9, 2008

A Little Survey on Software QA Tools

Many modern software systems consist of large sets of heterogeneously developed components. Object-oriented design, component-based software engineering, components off-the-shelf (COTS), design patterns, and open source software facilitate the development tasks, but assuring the quality in scenarios that entail (combinations of) these concepts is problematic.

Basically so many categories of test tools are available in the industry today. Some of the most important categories of these test tools are listed below.

Application Test Tools

Web Test Tools

Test Management Tools

Bug Tracking Tools

API Test Tools

Communications Test Tools

Requirements Management Tools

Most of the test tools are available in open source too. These tools are free. There is no need to pay a vendor to use these tools, but they still have a cost of ownership through evaluation, implementation, training and maintenance costs, the same as any software does. But with a handful of commercial vendors dominating the proprietary software testing tools market, make no mistake about it.

The paradox of quality assurance is that, although it’s a key value for every organization, the actions taken to ensure it are often left until late in the lifecycle when budgets are scarce, time is short and there is high pressure to deliver to the market. As a result there are often challenges associated with improving the software development process, reducing costs, improving quality and increasing reliability of planning. But so far the efforts to overcome these challenges are being successfully handled by software QA professionals to best safeguard the quality of good software.

From my viewpoint I found that future of software testing and quality assurance will be doing more on the web. The evolution in web development over the past two to three years has ushered in a new set of challenges for software quality professionals across the board; specifically, the emergence of Web 2.0 and the introduction of Ajax and SaaS architectures as new approaches for building rich content applications for the web. Such shifts combined with the need for enterprises to be agile and deliver products to market in shorter product cycles, has dramatically challenged many of the existing testing tools and rendered many old record and replay approaches almost obsolete. A detail survey of mine on these QA tools is attached here. It also consists descriptions of various leading testing tools in market today.

Today it will be impractical to rely too much on human configurations, tests, debugging, and management because software systems today are of very large scale and contain numerous components and users. It is believed that, it is time to bring a new generation of cutting-edge technologies and innovative processes to software testing that will assist software quality professionals in building better software easier in the near future.